


A Dustland Fairytale

by teddybearandlily



Category: Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins, The Killers (Band)
Genre: Careers (Hunger Games), District 13, District 2, Gen, Victors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-10
Updated: 2017-12-10
Packaged: 2019-02-13 00:19:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,181
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12971562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/teddybearandlily/pseuds/teddybearandlily
Summary: District Two, during the 75 years between the end of the first rebellion and the end of the second one.





	A Dustland Fairytale

**Author's Note:**

> I suppose this is a slight AU because apparently Snow was one years old during the First Hunger Games. Something I only looked up fourteen thousand words in. A precocious dictator.
> 
> Lyrics from "A Dustland Fairytale" by The Killers.

**A Dustland Fairytale**

 

_A dustland fairytale beginning_

 

**Year 6** ; District Two.

 

Everyone knew the stories in Two. It was the most literate district of them all; they had the blessing to pass on their stories to their children. The old stories. Stories of great herds of a creature now long gone with horns and shaggy fur painted onto caves in the rocky mountains; paintings old men swore they had seen as children but could never find again, and children searched for when they went over the mountain passes in Training. Not passed down by firelight in hushed whispers as the more seditious tales of other districts were, but printed in the glossy textbooks sent from the Capitol. Almost like the schoolbooks used in the Capitol themselves, the head teacher told parents proudly. A gift, for their loyalty, five years after they won. For five years they had been using only the blackboard and scratchy chalk, crammed two to a rickety desk, learning what the teacher could remember. They had been ordered to burn the old books as they were not fit for the new era. The updated books had the same familiar stories, they sighed in relief as they leafed through the pages, and a brand new chapter on the Dark Days and the Rebellion.

Children in Two learned to read from it, tracing the letters carefully, fingers underneath the scarlet words, gleaming proudly on the page. They spoke of _honour_ and _sacrifice_ , big words for an important district. They didn’t say Two had saved the Capitol, exactly, because obviously the Capitol had saved itself but teachers implied it with little fear. If it wasn’t for Two, well, the rebels might have won. The children would be living subjugated, in terror. They wouldn’t have food, they wouldn’t have the shiny new textbooks, maybe there wouldn’t even be a schoolhouse. The rebels had blown up Eight’s only school because it was a loyalist stronghold, that was one of the first live broadcasts of the war, and some of the older children remembered watching it because they hadn’t gone to school during the war either.

The children were so lucky to grow up in Two, they all knew that. They were so lucky to be given yet another chance to prove themselves to the Capitol, another opportunity to press the other Districts further into submission, kill District children to avenge their siblings killed by rebels, year after year, again and again. Show them all that it wasn’t a fluke, an arbitrary chance, an accident of history. They won because District 2 was stronger than all the other Districts put together and they could withstand the brutal assault for six months. There had been no conscription in the Capitol; hadn’t had to be with all of Two mobilised. The possibility of Two falling hadn’t even been considered. No contingency plan; the old generals were smug and complacent, and right. Two would bleed and bleed and withstand and withstand until the Capitol was ready to strike back, and it stood.

They would stand together with the Capitol against the falling rocks, the blockades of history, the siege of Two. And in return the Capitol gave them blood to avenge their fallen. 

Ten thousand civilians of Two had died alongside a third of their peacekeepers in the war. It was a fight to the death and the Capitol had saved them all by blowing up Thirteen, a necessary action. Think of all the children who were saved due to that one bomb from the Capitol all the way to Twelve. The Capitol could have killed them all but they were merciful. And nowhere were they more merciful than Two. 

One’s coastline was carved out for Two, a longstanding dispute between the Districts resolved in the shock of war. The swamps of the coast in One had concealed explosion caches and watertight boxes of propaganda pamphlets and piles upon piles of guns. Never again, the generals in the Capitol vowed. It was drained and a graveyard constructed for the martyrs from the reclaimed land. White light shone overhead during sunset, the Capitol sent fresh flowers every week, and all they asked for in return was two children per annum who were given the chance to prove, again, District Two’s loyalty. 

“You have sacrificed so much, and we in the Capitol are truly grateful,” Snow told the ragged survivors of Two. At his most conciliatory, his most charming. A statesman, on his Victory tour. In his tour of the Districts, he had chosen to go to Two first, of course, an enormous honour. Not One, where it was rumoured his grandfather had originally come from, or Twelve, still trembling from the reverberations of the bomb over Thirteen. Snow had clawed his way up during the war; few in Two had known him before and so they turned up in the square or watched on TV, curious to see the man who was suddenly everywhere: at a hospital in Three laughing with wounded Peacekeepers, announcing rations, urging their brave soldiers onward and calling for ever more recruits, by the President’s right hand side, often, always murmuring in his ear discreetly, signing the Treaty of Surrender in a quick loop. Many a child had gone to their death for him, just as they had gone for Two’s honour; their parents regarded him inscrutably, stock still for the cameras, serious and grave as they knew they should be, although inside their hearts beat furiously in their chest, to the beat of _we won we won we won we won_. They knew this was a unique moment in time, one for the history books the Capitol would commission, a moment they would replay over and over in their mind for the rest of their lives, leaving it as tattered and soft as a well-thumbed page of a treasured book.

“Some may ask how you could possibly give more,” Snow said, pausing.

The silence stretched. 

“There is always more to give.”

Two knew that. God help them, they knew there was always more, when you were on your knees and believed you had wrung everything you had out, there was always something more.

“Our country only functions when we all know our place, and Two alone among the Districts has always know its place. It was in Two our greatest warriors fell, securing our Victory. It is in Two we store our greatest treasure, after Thirteen fell, and it is in Two the battle was fought and the war won. Your sacrifice will not be forgotten.”

Eyes turned to the sky as planes flew above, streaming red behind them. They had been practicing for days before Snow’s arrival, so most had already seen the impressive display, but Snow’s presence on the dais gave the sky painting behind him gravitas, transformed it into the moment of perfect victory it should be. Celebrating, for the first time in years, that they were alive and almost certainly would be tomorrow.

Later, that speech was the point historians stopped at when tracing Snow’s inexorable rise to power. The last time anybody could have stopped him. Maybe if someone else had taken over, instead, maybe it wouldn’t have all happened. The games. The splintering of the districts. Maybe Thirteen could have risen, could have made itself known, bargained, fought, anything. Perhaps the second rebellion would have come sooner, or been less bloody. Maybe there would have been reconciliation. 

If only, some sighed. If only some disgruntled mother in the crowd had lifted a revolver from her heavy winter coat and shot him in the pale neck exposed to the frigid air. If only there was a Katniss, seventy years before her time. If only.

But there was only the loyal citizens of Two, flushed and secure in their Victory. It was the war to end all wars. They had won and secured for their children a lasting peace and a lasting settlement with the Capitol. They would never again cower as planes flew ahead and they all had to wonder whether they were theirs or Thirteen’s.

Thirteen was gone.

The war was over.

They had won. Snow had won. District Two had won.

It was over.

Snow announced the Games right there in their district. Already the paperwork had been signed to establish the Training Centre. Most of the children would become Peacekeepers – there was always, always a need for them. And some could volunteer for the Games, those who wanted to, wanted the glory. Not the food, of course. District Two would never go hungry. Snow was happy to promise them that obliquely. He didn’t shudder at much but he shuddered at how the war would have ended if Two had gone the same way as Thirteen. He had been surprised by Thirteen’s rebellion, and he vowed never to let that happen again. It had been a foolish idea by Caesar, leaving the nuclear weapons in Thirteen. Thirteen was just too far away. Too close to Twelve, influenced by their desperation. Left alone to plot. He understood the desire to keep such dangerous weapons away from their heartland, but it had turned out almost catastrophic. If it wasn’t for Two... and now the weapons were safe and Two must be held in an everlasting close embrace. A tight, clinching embrace. One they could never wriggle out of. Never want to.

He didn’t name it in the speech, but he was already plotting how the Games would work and exactly how this new world he found himself leading would work, and how the districts would be pacified through hunger. Experiments were done on the rebel prisoners before they were discarded of, discovering exactly how many calories a human of varying ages and sizes could live on without dying. He delegated studies of the District’s industry and the infrastructure destroyed and that still standing and asked experts for population numbers to decide the amount and quality of food that would be delivered to each District. To quantify their varying privileges and repressions. His meetings with his economists he bore with staid amusement at their excitement. The reconstruction of the Districts would propel a boom in the Capitol for decades, they said. Their heads full of TFP growth, his head was full of control and exact measures to be taken.

The Games was just one part of that control but from the beginning it was clear they would become the centre point. The beauty of the Games was that they could be both exact control – already he was planning to make sure certain names were called - and blunt control in the Districts, showing constantly that the Capitol could destroy everything they had, everyone they loved. That they could, and that they chose not to.

And now, only six years later, it was hard to remember a time when Two’s years weren’t structured by the Games.

One had won that year, but that was alright. There was always next year. And the year after that. Six year olds had started to tell their chubby toddler siblings that they were going to volunteer for the Games when they were old enough to. Their siblings stared back wide eyed, awed by the fervent words in the air. Parents smiled at their precocious offspring. Nobody was left in Two who hadn’t fought hard for the Capitol.

War stood still all around them. Not hunger, for the Capitol had continued to send the food packages it had sent during the Dark Days, six years after the end of the war. But the war lingered, and because their stomachs were full, it was even starker and more noticeable. The ruined rubbles of homes; the adverts at the marketplace for orphanage staff, no references required; even the dust had not fully disappeared. It hung, gritty in the air, especially in the outskirts. In the centre, gleaming new buildings were being put up. Construction workers shouted above the din and made the local residents complain to each other about the constant noise. The slums were cleaned out, the people moved to prefabricated homes near the mines, replaced by high rise structures with high rents that had no common area or green space any longer, but did have electricity for two hours every week, and more in a Victory year.

A wide road was carved through the middle of the new towerblocks. Nobody could march through the District to the new military centre without avoiding this road. Its opening gleamed in the distance, nestled among the mountains, reminiscent of the Cornucopia of the Games, like the promised land in the new schoolbooks, like the sacrifice in the old stories. But there was always that one building, that one church, that had been left to rot from the inside out, in the centre of the District, as much a landmark as the new headquarters proclaiming Two’s greater importance. People skirted around it, until it melted into the landscape, until children who had never seen it whole, in all its undamaged glory, never seen all of Two stream into it every year, never seen the shadow it cast on the mountain every day at twilight, began to play in it although their grandparents muttered that it was disrespectful.

Until it was like it had crumbled over millennia, instead of being bombed over one single night by the rebels in revenge for the massacre out in Eight. If they thought bombing Two’s most important symbol was likely to cause a loss in morale and a collapse in their fighting spirit, then the rebels were disappointed; Two grit their teeth and hardened their resolve. They would fight on, and when they won the war they would leave the ruined cathedral to stand as a monument to their sacrifice.

It had been a popular site for Capitolites to visit, before. They came as a pilgrimage, to pray. It was just enough of an adventure to make their friends jealous, going out into the Districts, but of course Two was safe, it wasn’t like Five or god forbid Twelve. Two before the Dark Days was Peacekeepers and a perfectly fitting place for the location of one of their holiest shrines. Now it was just as a battle site they came to gawp. They no longer removed their hats and covered their shoulders. They raised their voices instead of lowering them. The cathedral was entwined with the war and not with God anymore. Everyone knew Snow had no use for religion, anyway, although during the war priests had carried guns and churches had stockpiled bullets.

It was sold on postcards now, in the shops in the centre of Two, catering to Capitol tourists. On the back, in small letters, was written THE SACRIFICE OF TWO. The Capitol tourists were never cognisant enough of this fact to satisfy the Two shopkeepers, although of course they could never correct the people who bought them. It was always the Capitol’s sacrifice, and the Capitol’s war, and the Capitol’s Victory, with them. They lamented the Cathedral’s destruction but not as a living place of worship for Two, not because of its importance to Two; instead they mourned it as the rebels striking at a place they knew was important to the Capitol. Striking at the cathedral was like striking at the heart of the Capitol body, everybody knew that. It had been a terrible crime. Hadn’t the Capitol left alone the architectural marvels of Six, the fertile plains of Ten, the thriving industrial plants in Three, even the grain silos of Nine that were a clear justifiable military target because the rebels there kept storing their explosives in them.

\- because they needed them after the war, of course, to sustain the Capitol itself, the factories of Three were running eight days after the Surrender was announced and the workers laboured for free, reparations, their wage was their life –

\- and, of course, they hadn’t left alone anything that couldn’t be used to make money -

\- and Thirteen was different, they were threatening not only the Capitol, but all the Districts –

Six rebel commanders had been hanged for the burning of Two’s cathedral.

Six years, and no tribute from Two had ever gone hungry in the Games. Six years, and the graves still wept, silently, although not even a single tear dripped down the faces of the men and women who visited them.

In the low slung outskirts, there was no electricity and no penetrating view of the district – Two can police themselves, the Controller proudly announced, just like they policed the other districts – but there was fierce pride at their victory. It had been hard fought and long awaited; the price was paid in blood willingly spilt. Almost no family had emerged unscathed. Fathers and sons limped, mothers and daughters cut vegetables, the fruit of their victory, one handed, the price of their victory.

It had been their war and now it was their victory. The felt it even more strongly still than the citizens in the Capitol, removed and distant and busy enjoying the prosperity that had come after the Districts tore themselves apart. Victory in the Capitol was soft like a peach, no bruised flesh, just shiny toys and ever increasing living standards and even the poorest Capitol citizen could hope for better for their children. The entertainment of a bloodbath re-enacted, every year. Stage managed and polished and controlled just like the war had been, for them. The television had been invented only two decades prior to the rebellion by a brilliant young man in Three, quickly spirited to the Capitol. Some said there never would have been such a wide-spread, sustained attack against the Capitol without their fancy invention.

But the Capitol fought back. Propaganda split the airwaves. The inventor defected to the rebels, cheered by throngs on the street of Three the night it was announced that night on the Capitol’s airwaves, a brief interruption that didn’t last long. The success of the Capitol’s communication strategy, alternating blood and gore and mangled limbs and dirty ragged rebels clutching machetes with healthy and tanned, shiny and strong Capitol and Allied soldiers, gleaming bright white uniforms, straight backed, slick combed hair, with their beautiful and sleek weapons, helping a woman in Three to pack her house under an evacuation order, or lifting children onto trucks, was such that there were fears, after. How to captivate and maintain an audience. What could possibly be more engaging than gunfire and the bodies of traitors falling in the street? What could be more stabilising and support-garnering than a close up of a baby’s corpse, cut out of its mother stomach by rebels in Eleven because her husband was a Peacekeeper?

The answer: forcing the children of the rebels to fight. Savage like their parents had been, had brought them up to be. Showing the innate brutality of the Districts but also their pacification. Forced to prance about half-naked, to bare themselves for the Capitol. Forced to kill and forced to love them. 

And oh, they fought. Brought up in the war, bombs falling around them at night, clutching to their older siblings who were clutching guns. Bed time stories of a different world and poison and righteous executions and revenge. They grew up knowing one day they would fight the Capitol but they grew up to fight for the Capitol. Some wondered if their parents were rolling in their graves because they didn’t know their parents didn’t have graves.

The Capitol watched the games avidly. For decades before the Uprising they had ignored the Districts, taken them for granted. Here was a chance to see them up close, to study them and learn about them, beyond the wartime tales and propaganda.

For the Capitol citizens, certain words came to mind for certain Districts. Thirteen; gone. Twelve; distant, savage, hungry. Images of emaciated children, crawling as eagles swooped hungrily, like the famous picture printed on the front page of the daily times, and there was a brief scandal, outrage, Snow was forced to comment and promise a delivery of food, the newspaper folded two months later. Eleven; dark. Ten; stocky, simple. Nine; there was a famous nightclub in the Capitol called District Nine and although it really had nothing to do with the District itself, it was all people there thought about when they heard of Nine. Eight; flighty. Four; uneducated and uncaring. Three; rebellion. One; pretty, glimmer, beauty.

Two; ours.

There could be so many others. Reliable, dependable, loyal, strong.

But that was what it came down to in the end. District Two belonged to the Capitol.

 

 

_He looked just like you’d want him to_

_Some kind of slick chrome American prince_

 

**Year 15.**

 

The Capitol was electric that year. A craze swept in like a tsunami and lingered, like the tendrils of mistletoe dripping down that had been so popular the year before and now sat in hushed storage. A hunger for light: large lamps and small lamps, fairy lights and tea lights, warm damp circles of light that pooled where your fingertips gently brushed it, and harsh white strips of overhead bulbs. Glass lights carefully fashioned into blue butterflies that flew around for hours before flapping tiredly and disappearing into darkness. Workers in Three worked seventeen hour shifts, grinding their fingers to the bone producing the lights. Hardly any of them could afford electricity for the silly little lights; they used their allowance on inventions, generally. Every one of them longed for an invention that would lift them out of poverty in Three, taken to the Capitol by high speed train – produced in Two, but designed in Three of course – never to leave.

Every year schoolchildren with the highest marks from Two visited the Capitol as a Christmas present and that year they walked the streets, mouth wide open in all their provincial amazement, never having so much light before. They met Two’s victors, lounging in their spacious and well-lit mansions in the Capitol – Two among all districts were given this honour.

The Capitol citizens preened as they watched the well behaved lines of District children parading through the streets gaping at them so admirably. So roughhewn and simple, but wasn’t it gratifying, to see these polite children, the product of Capitol goodness and largesse. Weren’t they righteous people, for protecting the District children from hunger and deprivation, from violence and war even. What would the Districts be like if the Capitol left, of course an unthinkable proposition? It worked, the whole system worked; looking at the deferential and well-groomed children of Two, anyone could see that.

This message to the Capitol sent by sending Two’s children was almost greater than the message imparted to those children and transmitted back home. They arrived back in Two and though their district pride burned as strong as ever, they saw the cracks where before they had seen the gleam, saw the small low buildings and the dirty overalls of the men who worked in the quarry.

One thing unsettled some of them, nagged at the back of their head, although each child kept it to themselves, never knew their friend had noticed it too; when they had arrived at the vast glass station, the men who had carried their luggage from the train had been just as clearly from the Capitol as the suited office workers strolling around. They had seen dusty, dirty construction workers on the street of the Capitol just like in Two. Clearly Capitol, not sent in by the Districts: pale, purple-eyed, even with tattoos, punishable by death in the Districts. They had never before thought who had built the buildings that rose above the skyline. Somehow, they had never thought there were people like that in the Capitol. It dimmed the glint somewhat. Their Capitol minders, eyes glazing over the workers like always, never imagined what they were inadvertently showing to their guests. Never bothered hiding them. Hierarchies, everywhere. It was only natural. A District in the Capitol; a Capitol in every District.

The rebels had tried to abolish these hierarchies but they had failed and God knows what they would have done if they had won anyway. Snow wasn’t an ideologue like his predecessor; Snow just wanted power. Caesar had always believed fervently in traditional authority. Believed society would only function with hierarchy at every level – the state, the family, everything in between, men and women, adults and children, workers and merchants; believed this hierarchy was not only necessary but also right.

He had grown up in an orphanage in the days when the Capitol was more capricious, less brutal almost, and more guileless. He despised this weakness and the silly fluttery manners of the other Capitol citizens; didn’t they realise what they were creating, what they were allowing, drinking and dancing the night away while the people of the citizens worked and grumbled and simmered? Who did they expect to protect their riches? Two’s Peacekeepers would do their best, with their slavish obedience to their masters, but they couldn’t do it alone.

He didn’t mind the face paint and the dinner parties, exactly, saw that he could easily come to rule over such people, with such distractions, but those things must come alongside repression and rule in the districts. It had to, to allow for them at all. Otherwise it would all come down.

He sat at ball gown and black tie parties, night after night, all the while thinking, why are we dancing while the world is burning?

One night, tired of thinking, he seized power aged thirty and never looked back. Promoted men who understood the need for a harsh hand, an iron fist, a curtain of steel that would resist the swing of the axe from Twelve’s miners or the slippery ropes of Four. Misunderstood the nature of a young man who reminded him of himself, who he believed trusted just as strongly as he did in the necessary diktat of himself.

Snow, years after taking power from Caesar in a bloodless coup – bloodless but poison filled – years after the Dark Days, remembered Caesar’s days when he was sharper, when he had been the one person to correctly identify what was going to happen and although he didn’t prevent it, if he hadn’t have blunted the District’s somewhat during his decades of power, there was no doubt the rebellion could have been much worse.

\- Snow never considered Caesar’s repression inflamed the Districts, that maybe the spark would have died down if those parties had carried on and the Capitol continued to mostly ignore the Districts –

\- then again, maybe not, maybe the rebellion would have happened anyway, as the people watched the Capitol partying while they starved, maybe they’d wish for more rule and order -

\- Snow never considered a better world possible, only one he could better control -

He commissioned a secret report to identify the likelihood of another rebellion, identify where it might come from and how potential triggers and flashpoints could be mitigated. It made him weak and he knew that, threatened and promised riches in equal measure to its authors. It made him weak but he had to know and he had got too far to let his pride get the better of him. He couldn’t get over how ageing Caesar had been so taken by surprise by Thirteen – Snow had been busy in Three, as communications technology slowly developed and then exploded, seeing its potential before almost everyone else, stupidly and mistakenly believing if Caesar was good for anything it was controlling the god-damn outer districts where Snow had never ever been. He still remembered the panicked phone call he received from Caesar, begging him to return to the Capitol because Thirteen had rebelled. 

Snow had asked if perhaps he should go to Thirteen instead.

“It’s too late! It’s too late!” Caesar said.

The findings of the report were interesting. People will tolerate being poor, they said. What they will not tolerate is being poor as their neighbours become richer. The academics in the university in the Capitol said the Districts would not rise up again even under the grinding poverty – worse than it had ever been before the rebellion – because they were all living under poverty together. Every year, the merchants of Twelve and the kulaks of Nine and the zamindars of Eleven, who still performed useful functions and so were permitted to survive as classes, divide divide divide, petitioned the Capitol in vain for some further help, some further upswing in their position, loans to expand their businesses, to extract more and more from the wretched of their district and give less and less to the Capitol, and every year they were denied. Year after year, their children were reaped despite the paucity of their names in the Reaping ball. There was no hope, as sure for them as for the starving children in Twelve or the toiling serfs and peasants of Nine and Eleven, and Snow only hoped the poorest saw that. No hope and no equality - apart from Two, of course, but that was different, and rebellion there was unthinkable.

Rebellion could come again, the academics persisted stubbornly in pointing out publicly, against Snow’s wishes, not when there was poverty for all but when the poor of the Districts suddenly saw others rising and they remained poor. A good excuse for gnawing hunger and no relief. Still, the report concluded that rebellion was almost impossible, what with the Games and the new technology and the fences and the example of Thirteen. Snow quizzed them carefully and intently on this point: and what if there was not the example of Thirteen? What if the Capitol had not bombed it into oblivion? Well, the academics stuttered, it wouldn’t necessarily matter if it had not been totally destroyed, although of course it had been – of course, Snow thinks bitterly – as long as the District’s believed the Capitol would not hesitate to bomb them indiscriminately. Snow authorised the tape playing of the rubble of 13 that very day, released it from the intelligence services, idly noticing the flying bird in the corner and thinking, _how fitting_. And, as the academic said, not bothering to cite sources because it was common knowledge, they always had Two, their safeguard, their safety valve, their canary in the coalmine that would never sing. 

Unthinkable.

Unless there is inequality. 

They say.

Snow should have heeded the warning. A girl and boy from the Seam in Twelve certainly did.

Fifteen years since the Rebellion was crushed and Snow was no longer worried, although he was always cautious. Fifteen years of borders that it was becoming clear would never be re-opened, of rations and two full blown famines in Twelve and Ten, fifteen successful Games. Fifteen years and eight Victors for Two.

Thirty children. Most of them volunteers, but not all. The first year they sent in both children of a rebel, but by the next year nobody knew where those children had gone. One had won that second year, and Two was jealous; what had One done during the war? Hidden in their houses and cried about the loss of their hair dye and make up? Some had joined the rebellion, even. Shame. One was much wealthier than Two than it had ever been before the rebellion, as they profited from the blood spilled in Two, the Capitol’s ever increasing consumption and its spasm of building and expansion after the war. Despite Two’s sacrifice and One’s wavering during the war, they profited. They had made the right decision, in the end, but Two never forgot the months it had stood alone alongside the Capitol against the rebels.

More volunteers than not, by now. The Training Centre is doing its job, churning out Peacekeepers who can kill and Tributes who can smile while doing so. Two has never had the raw sexual appeal of One or even of half-clothed Four – and how the fuck did Four become a Career district when their industry was _fishing_ , of all things. Stinking, rotten fish. Still – better than Three, the more natural choice, because they had all been traitors there during the rebellion, even the ones who professed innocence afterwards and somehow got away with it. Three’s rebels had launched an invasion of Two, trying to grind them down through sheer force, and hatred rent the border still, all these years later. The Capitol had built a giant fence between the two after Two’s demobilised veterans – the ones who were too grizzled to join the professional Peacekeepers and paid a token amount as a kind of civilian militia - launched incursions to Three in the months after victory, picking off villagers in the border regions. The Capitol had tolerated it until it became clear their bloodlust would never be satiated and the wall went up. Fences were appearing all over Panem then, between districts and even within them in the larger ones. The war had made very clear how dangerous it was to allow the Districts contact with one another. United, they stood. Of course, they also collapsed together but it had come too close.

Two hadn’t won in a few years now. It had been fifteen years and they were due a win and also a surprise. Snow had explained the rules in great detail a few years in, and everyone was waiting for the first Quarter Quell with curiosity and even excitement. Fifteen years and the last of the rebels, pale and squinting and _weak_ , a propaganda coup, blinking in the sudden light as they were pulled from their warren hiding places, rounded up the previous year and executed, televised for the first time in colour in Two, and the blood seemed enhanced because it was so red, and victory was secure and peace real now. Snow announced before the games that it would be a special year; that siblings would be reaped to show that it was not loyalty to family that mattered, but loyalty to the Capitol. 

For Two, it was no matter. The Training Centre already taught them that. 

Their female Tribute that year slit her younger brother’s throat but that sacrifice wasn’t enough to get her through to the end. Still, she did well. The final three, and that was a result her mother could be proud of. 

It wasn’t loyalty to the family that mattered, but loyalty to the Capitol.

 

 

_And the decades disappear like sinking ships_

_But we persevere_

 

**Year 50.**

 

Half a century since the Hunger Games began. Half a century since the war was won, but as memories of it fade and memories of the Game only strengthen, the event the Hunger Games is commemorating is almost less important than the Games’s existence. 

During the fifty years, District Two had built a legacy. More Victors than any other District. Some of the most well-known and thrilling Victors. Nobody could remember the last year there hadn’t been a volunteer. Now, there were too many as children were fed tales of grandparents in the war and the children, growing up where nothing was reified more than the Capitol, could scarcely believe it was their own grandparents with their canes and hearing devices that had once held the gates shut against the barbarians, the ones who had saved the Capitol all on their own. They shone in the reflected glory, and Snow came every few years to feed his pampered pets, feed their idea of themselves as unique among the Districts, almost equal to the Capitol. They were only put in the Hunger Games to win, they knew. The others were put in to starve. Sure, there had been upsets over the years. The years during the thirties with a string of defeats had hurt, but Agrippa had redeemed them and more with her stunning victory. Thirteen kills. The record still stood. When it was broken, it would be by her own district, everyone was sure. 

The District strove desperately to be like the Capitol in every way; behind their hands, One and Four sniggered at them, it was pathetic, how they had lost almost all of their own identity and what remained was what the Capitol provided for them in scraps. They banned their own alphabet and instituted the Capitol’s even before the Capitol got around to doing the same in the other Districts. Even some in the Capitol were amused by it. It was a recurring joke, the lengths Two would go to impress them. 

When these jokes were made by Mentors during the Games the victors snarled and threw imaginary knives, and thought, think about all we have done for you. All we continue to do. As long as Two stood, how could the Capitol even think about destroying the Districts? It was forbidden to say this so they buried it deep inside, and reminded themselves of their years of training in Two.

They had won. No matter how many traitorous Districts laughed at them, it was Two that had won and were still winning, half a century after. They sneered at pretty One and grasping Four, the forgettable middle Districts and the outer Districts where they might as well be barbarians, where they prefer to let their children starve than fight. No wonder they lost the war. At least a Two has never won by accident, like the pathetic runts who win by doggy paddling to safety or because they happened to be asleep in a tree. And never by design, either, like Seven did that year the Gamekeepers blew up the career’s den, killing both of Two’s Tributes, and everyone knew it was because Seven never won.

Two have always earned it. They’ve earned every single privilege. Every single loaf of bread, every gram of tesserae provided without the fear of reaping, every single Victor they pull through. Two have always fought for survival, for their children’s lives, for their District and the Capitol.

The other Districts don’t fight, they just complain. It was like that in the Dark Days, and it’s like that now. Fifty years, and it’s like nothing has changed.

When they hear the Second Quarter Quell they grin ferociously, and think, _great, twice the chances_. The boy from Twelve wins but quickly manages to disgrace himself like a Victor from Two never would. They count it as a win.

Fifty years, and the TV is full of programmes on the war, re-enactments and documentaries and in depth investigations into individual battles and love stories set in that time period and interviews of ageing soldiers who can’t believe it’s been so long, telling their stories, almost lovingly, almost missing the pure simplicity of a war. There are also at least as many programmes about the Games and an hour-long special about each of Two’s Victors. In the Training centre, it is set as homework and children delight in going home and when their parents arrive home to find them gazing at the TV and ask them sternly about homework, innocently open their eyes and say “But Mum, this is my homework!”

Their first victor was Flavia, tall and strong, flaming hair. She was the first Volunteer of the Games and she was dead now but never forgotten. The last Victor was the 49th. Nubia; small and dark, unusual for Two. Her District loves her because she shows their versatility. They don’t just win with brute strength, although they’re generally less complicated than One with their fluttering eyelashes, or Four with their showy statement pieces. In between: Lupus, Ionathan, Agrippa, Augustus, Felix and on and on and on, so many names that ‘as many as Two has Victors’ was a common phrase in other Districts. Lyme, who won and retreated immediately almost into obscurity, allowed in Two because they had always had more than enough Victors for their duties, to cut ribbons and shake hands with local politicians, to go to children’s birthday parties in the Capitol and be interviewed on TV and mentor the Tributes every year, to decide what gifts they would get from Two’s almost limitless treasury and to show them the ropes when their Tributes became Victors. Brutus, perhaps their most famous Victor.

Brutus doesn’t mean brute. Not literally, anyway. But he isn’t good with words and has no idea how to tell people this. It means heavy and he feels more comfortable with this description than brute; he is thick set, can heft a pallet of rocks in his strong arms, helping his father as a teenager, training to be a mason although it is clear to anyone he can fight and is a clear contender for the reaping. He is more easy going than most for the honour of going to the Games, would be content to stay in Two and cut stones his whole life. Gaius, his competitor throughout training, sharp and slippery and fast whereas Brutus is strong and solid on his feet, comes to Brutus at the last minute, in the middle of the night – Brutus almost knocks him out, he’s so startled at being woken – and tells Brutus he’s not going to volunteer. Brutus doesn’t understand but volunteers the next day and takes the good-natured punch Tiberius swings at him; Tiberius had specially mentored Gaius, and Gaius obviously hadn’t said anything. Brutus stayed silent. He was never sure of what to say at the best moments, and he didn’t understand what had happened. It didn’t matter to him. He was going to the Games. He can swing with an axe and fell a tree; he can punch through concrete and forge swords. He killed three at the bloodbath, and sat there that night, half-asleep, confident that if the Careers suddenly turned on each other nobody would go for him first. 

The boy from One made eyes at him across the dying fire, seductive. _One_ , he thought, rolling his eyes and shifting further into the darkness. He didn’t want to kiss any boy, especially one he would very likely be trying to kill shortly. He didn’t want to kiss anyone with one hand clutching his knife. It just wasn’t him. It just wasn’t Two. He wanted clean and uncomplicated kills. When he heard the gong go at the end, he had to shake his head to clear the blood from his eyes and mind but after he did the world was still there and whole and almost the same. That was the good thing about Two, that even the other Careers didn’t really understand. You went home, and everybody supported what you had done. Your parents welcomed you happily, and you got on with your life like you had never left, except you had more opportunities and more money and more admirers. You went home, and took a husband or wife and lived happily ever after. No nightmares. No blood in the dead of night. No regrets.

 

_I saw the devil wrapping up his hands_

_He’s getting ready for the showdown_

 

**Year 61.**

 

District Two was steady and strong, like the mountains. Course and rough grained, silent and upright, and when they were struck, like an avalanche coursing down the slopes, they attacked without mercy.

But the Capitol forgot. Strike a river against rock and it will take a long time but the rock will wear away in the end. Erosion and weathering, glaciers shaping the world, leaving their marks even when they melt in the spring. Over thousands and thousands of years, the rock never wins. 

And: here’s the thing.

What was there to stop Two rebelling?

Why would there be any fear in Two?

When their children are spared every year.

Why would there be any hunger?

When they can take tesserae without fear, when the Capitol subsidises their food so they can grow up strong, when they get Victory packages more often than not.

Why would there be any rebellion?

Well, why not?

With no fear, no hunger, no pressure subduing them, trampling them, filling their mouth with white hot ash, the bones of their children, the caw of hunger.

When parents do not have to fear the death of their children, they become dangerous. The very purpose of the Hunger Games stops working. And while most of Two believed in glory, while for most their District and the Capitol was enough to keep them in line, grateful they were given their children, knew it could change if they protested, it wasn’t enough for everybody. The quarry workers, especially, their young children spared, their oldest children only vulnerable if they wanted to go, and most didn’t, more insular in the outer villages, less loyal, knowing their parents relied more on their labour.

Lyme and Brutus discussed it once, the importance and value of winning. Brutus had made one of his blundering mistakes he seemed to make often; he liked Lyme because she smiled kindly and corrected him with a self-deprecating tone, almost as if she had been the one to make an error. Brutus had grown up on the edge of Two, near the wall by Three. The quarry workers still hated the wall, though few remembered when it wasn’t there. Some of the best stone was on the other side and Three had always let them quarry there, because of course their soft hands that deftly connected wires couldn’t possibly do the hard work of getting the rock out. He grew up in a small family, typical outer-Two, loyal certainly, but in a theoretical sense. His promise was noticed in school; his parents asked him if he wanted to go to the training programme and he shrugged, and they said, _well, a term won’t hurt anyone_ , and Brutus learned things he could beat almost anyone at for the first time in his life and the rest was District Two legend. Lyme was talking and talking, like she was apt to do with people she trusted, which wasn’t many people. Brutus wasn’t sure why she trusted him. He had said something about how District Two’s winning was the point of the Games.

Lyme jumped in, sharp and cool, but not directed at him. “The victory isn’t in winning, Brutus. It’s in volunteering. It’s in going willingly. It’s in fighting and dying with dignity, for the District and for the Capitol. Glory is a much maligned word, but, well, if it fits!”

And it was true that Two couldn’t see the victory in winning: how could they, when they didn’t always win? And how, even if they did win every single year, only one of their Tributes could ever win?

Around the 59th Games, a group of quarry workers in Two crystallised their years of complaints and their network of book smuggling into an informal grouping. They had meetings, recruited by personal contacts. Every time someone new joined, they made sure they understood the penalty for what they were doing.

Death. 

And maybe not just for them. Maybe for their family. Maybe for their children. Maybe torture. Maybe the Games, if they were young enough. 

They were a small group, but they got together when they could and talked and discussed and argued and wrote and read; an endless meeting.

Their informal leader – they had had a lively, spirited debate on the need for a leader, and agreed that eventually there would be no leader but for now it helped to have one person to coordinate meetings at the very least – often stood on the table and denounced the System, the Capitol, the Guilty in Two, the Innocent of the Districts.

They knew the material conditions were not optimal for a rebellion and they knew the rebels sixty years ago had been crushed. But they also knew it had been closer than the Capitol ever wanted to admit because they had grown up with the knowledge it was only Two’s sacrifice-to-end-all-sacrifices that had won the war for the Capitol. It was their mistake and they had to put it right. And maybe they had never feared for their children, and maybe they had never felt the gnawing of hunger but it still wasn’t right. Anyone could tell that, if they were looking. The starved look of Twelve’s Tributes most year, the twelve-year-old from Three who had been reaped the year before last and who on Panem cared if his great-grandfather was a traitor, no child deserved to die the way he did. Things are clearly worse in the other Districts – everyone in Two knows that, they _gloat_ about it – and even in Two things aren’t rosy all of the time.

Old Octavius’s father had fought, and hadn’t held back in the stories he told Octavius as a boy on his knee. The Capitol had been forged in blood, and massacres, illegitimate from the very start, barbaric like they called the outer Districts who were just trying to survive and it was all there, in the stories parents told their children, if one just listened closely.

They knew their fellow people were spineless, cowardly, boot-licking compradors who would never, as long as they lived, stand up to the Capitol.

They never got any Victors, despite the surplus in Two. Never really tried. They looked down upon their Tributes, never supported them, even in the years they saved the quarry workers’ children and died anyway. There was no purity in death. Often they had gone out fighting – admirable, maybe, but not when it was for the Capitol. It was a good thing Lyme never found out about them. Despite the sad irony, it was a good thing the rebels of Two were unaware of their comrades outside their borders, half forming plans even then, not that they would be able to contact them in any case across the unbreachable walls and mountains. Unaware that the very notion of rebels in Two was seen as impossible in Twelve and Nine and Four, a sacrosanct belief until the day Lyme followed Finnick to the hideout, walked in there and told them she wanted in and refused to leave when they pretended to be playing cards. She was instrumental in Two’s fall when the rebellion succeeded so it was a good thing she didn’t join the failed one.

An infiltrator from Thirteen did join. She blended in well to Two, its regimented daily life and stiff, stern communication. She said it to everyone she came across after crossing into Two, her fake papers burning in her dress pocket, more desperately as the months went by, Excuse me miss, excuse me sir, “Twelve years the served Chedorlaomer.” To traders at the market, to the merchants and the doctors and the blacksmiths and the bricklayers, receiving puzzled looks from all. Eventually she said it to the right person, the English schoolteacher who replied, quick as a whip, “And the thirteenth year they rebelled.” It was done cautiously, everybody suspect and afraid. Trust was a commodity too and although they didn’t believe in commodities, truth was truth. And the code meant, _I know Thirteen survived_.

It had been a guess, pure and simple. A few scraps of information from Octavius’s father, some of the things Snow had said in the early days; a hope, that Thirteen had not been bowed after all. It meant a lot to have it confirmed. For decades, Thirteen had been an effective deterrent to rebellion, one they still spoke about. Thirteen had been destroyed; if Two rebelled, it would surely be destroyed too. Some of the rebels hated their District, but not all. It ran too deep. They were mountains, after all. They built up over thousands of years and could not be scraped away easily. The idea, the hope, that they could struggle and fight and win and keep their district was a piece of hope as potent as any.

Although her existence gave them hope, what she said unsettled the rebels of Two. She was unimpressed with Thirteen, what they saw as the promised land, the model for a new world. Its lack of urgency, content to sit there while the land outside ravaged and burned. While things got worse and worse. While the few who made it there told of starvation in Twelve, and it seemed to get worse every year. How time was slipping through their hands and how hope was running out. 

How she hoped, believed, there could be a better world.

The quarry workers were slightly dismayed. Even in their wildest dreams of the promised world, in the reason they struggled, in the hope they held in their head late at night. Even there, people dreamed of a better world.

She had left semi-officially; they thought she would die, resigned to losing the secrets she knew which would be tortured out of her. Thirteen took in anyone who made it to Thirteen, and none had ever left. What would the Capitol do if they heard Thirteen was breaking its end of the bargain, and news of its survival spread because its people travelled to the Districts?

Why should she care what the Capitol wanted?

Still, the mission she was expected to fail was to gather information. On all Districts, really, but Two especially. The loyal District. The tough nut to crack. There hadn’t even had to be a clean up after the Victory; the citizens of Two had killed their traitors themselves.

She told them of her childhood the first meeting, chewing bread haphazardly, like she knew she had to eat to survive but took no pleasure from it. The distant parents, the beloved younger sister, killed in a flu outbreak when she was ten.

“That kind of loss, it hits you like a freight train. And it’s all you can do to stay standing.” She spoke quickly, like there were Peacekeepers making their way to her at any moment.

The way she spoke was funny, too florid, foreign to the plain speaking Two. One of the youngest rebels imagines the trains that go passing by, past the high fences and the wasteland of rubble and earth. Imagines standing on the tracks, facing down the train coming head on towards her, staring into its headlights bearing down, cutting through the night like they would cut through her.

Probably it would kill her. She would explode into a million pieces, coat the railway tracks gleaming red, like a pretty picture-perfect postcard Christmas. Holly and the ivy.

The group worry she might hate Two but she laughs, startled. “You’re victims,” she says confidently. She’s loquacious and perky, and they warm to her immediately. “We’re trying to liberate you. That’s why I’m here. Maybe in Twelve they make distinctions, but we don’t in Thirteen. And if we did, we’d be at the top of the list of traitors. We know that. You’re far more victims than we are. After... after, we’ll forgive and forget and we’ll live together. You kill children and we let them die. All of us tell ourselves we have a choice. Maybe we do and maybe we don’t. I personally think we always have a personal choice to make. But I don’t have to lecture _you_ on that. And even for the others in Two... They’re here and they’re still living. That’s victory too. It’s just as much, if not more, than what we’re doing. Sometimes that’s all you can do, survive. It doesn’t mean we have to accept it forever."

She could speak plainly too, and when she did they felt emotion rise in their breast, felt something like hope thumping furiously, felt passionate and free and alive. Like, however hard it would be, and however impossible it seemed, they could really save Two from itself and save the other Districts too. Like they wouldn’t have to live in fear for their children, just like now, but they wouldn’t have to live with the guilt either of other people’s children, sent to the slaughterhouse from farms and mines and factories all over Panem.

As the weeks passed, she told them more of Thirteen, of why had been so desperate to leave. She had hated its passivity, the cool, detached eyes of the Generals, the gerontocracy, who had removed their hands from the button when the Capitol threatened to wipe them off the map and held them up in surrender. Who had prioritised their lives and who left the innocent children of Twelve and the guilty loyal citizens of Two alike to the Capitol’s mercy. There was barely a strategy any longer, just survival. Nobody spoke of it in Thirteen, and she hated that too, the sterile atmosphere, no debate not because it wasn’t allowed, but because there was nothing to debate anymore. She had sat there at mealtimes, at the same time every day, eating her allotted mush of steamed vegetables and rice, until one day she had thought to herself, what are we doing, here in our underground hole, playing at being safe, when we’re not safe while the Capitol still exists, when we’re not free while the Districts are subjugated, when we’re hiding underground while the world burns! 

There was nowhere to put their dissidents, but they didn’t need to put them anywhere. It was like Two in some twisted parallel; most had grown up in the claustrophobic atmosphere, were terrified to leave the safety of Thirteen. They weren’t the rebels they were sixty years ago. They would stand no chance against the Capitol and the longer time went on, the more likely the Capitol were to come to this conclusion. Somebody had to do something soon, the woman said, desperate. Somebody had to light a spark. Otherwise their chance would go, the window of opportunity close forever.

So she had left, to see if she could make links with the underground rebels in the other Districts. She had arrived in Twelve after the long trek, burning with anger at what refugees from Twelve had said, laden with messages in her brain and not pocket so if she was stopped and searched she wouldn’t give anything away.

There was no resistance in Twelve. The people were too desperate. She doesn’t say much more about them.

Eleven was better, but barely; Five, she actually met a Victor but refused to say who, and in Three – they were all very impressed by the way she had passed between Districts in an immobile landscape – the people talked with such bitterness about the Capitol she feared for them.

She is silent for a moment. When she speaks, her voice is grave and her eyes steadfast, staring into the distance. She speaks in a low voice, and everyone leans in to listen.

“There was a man in Ten I never forgot. He was a shepherd. Had a large family, thirty or so grandchildren to look after. He was part of the resistance his whole life, I believe. Had a family anyway. Did his best to protect them. He let me stay with him and I learned a lot from him. While I was there, there was some terrible fighting in the District. You might not know, there is a largish migrant population in District 10, from 11, the Capitol won’t let them go home, actually for most of them home _is_ Ten. There’s some... tension between the populations. Many of Ten blame those poor migrants for anything bad that happens, any crime, any theft, any crack of the whip. It’s terrible. You know, we shouldn’t assume solidarity. That was another lesson I learned.” 

“One day, there was a terrible ruckus... he was the first out of the door when he heard the screaming. I followed him, all dressed up in my dusty overalls, mud smeared in my hair, he would swear up and down I was another granddaughter. Some of the richer people in Ten were burning the migrant’s shacks down, they said they had stolen a silver plate. Whether that’s true or not, I don’t know, but there’s no excuse for what they were doing. It’s just another manifestation of the Capitol’s violence. If we didn’t all live in such conditions, if we weren’t taught to fight each other, if we didn’t base our government on violence, well, you all know this. Anyway, the man I was staying with, he pushed his way through the passive crowd, fire in his eyes, spoke up for the migrants, against the merchants. Another shepherd stepped in, and then another one. They got them all out safe, dampened down the flames.”

“Do you know how terribly the shepherds are treated in District 10, by the Capitol and the merchants. How much they have to fear. They were almost wiped out in the Dark Days. And the fact that they would stick their heads above the parapets for the migrants...” She shook her head, almost in disbelief.

“The fact that you could be against the wall and still standing up and stepping forward for other people... I never forgot that. And you know, I’ll fight for all of you here in Two and all of the Districts, but I will especially fight for those shepherds in Ten.”

It all fell apart in the end. All rebellions against the state do, in some form, eventually. They began to argue savagely about the future they were trying so hard to birth.

“No, I understand, Cleo, but what I’m saying is that loving your district is revolutionary, it’s the only thing that’ll get people to rebel. Trust me, you haven’t been to the quarries. You tell them you’re going to abolish District Two, they’ll never support you. I don’t understand how you don’t get this, support for District Two is not the same as support for the Capitol. And – even if it was – support for _Twelve_ , for God’s sake, is definitely not the same as for the Capitol!”

“But it is the same! It’s never revolutionary to support any state, it’s always counter-revolutionary. District Two and the Capitol are the same. And even if they’re not right now, they would become so. If we removed the Capitol but left District Two in place, or any of the Districts, yes including Twelve, the oppression would just move down a level. You don’t think there is an elite in Twelve? What about the shepherds and migrants of Ten? What would become of them, if Ten suddenly ruled itself?”

“Are you gonna tell the miners in Twelve they have to give up their whole identity when that’s essentially all they have? What about the fishermen in Four? Hell, the people here... they’ll never accept not being Two. Never.”

“Then we will always fail. I’m fighting for our right to live without any hierarchy. What the hell are you doing here?”

The next meeting, they argued just as fiercely about whether there was even any point of taking action. The infiltrator from thirteen was arguing passionately in favour of action, action today and action tomorrow, action forever. 

She closed her eyes. “Even if somebody told me the world was going to end at midnight tomorrow, it would still be worth fighting at 11.59.”

Her outcry didn’t stop the argument. 

When she was captured alongside them, she held her head up high and stated boldly, “I’m from Thirteen.” Soldiers gaped at her, confused, like she was making it up, like it was a statement of defiance and not truth, like it was a metaphor, and that might have been the end of it, but an officer had heard and removed her. She never came back. They didn’t know whether she had been killed quickly, so she couldn’t tell anyone of the secret of Thirteen, or sent to the Capitol and interrogated for its secrets. They all knew her broken body would be hovercrafted to the edge of Twelve and dropped there. An unexploded bomb. A prisoner of war, returned. Gentle shelling. The first soldier of Thirteen killed for more than sixty years. They could only hope she would be remembered and celebrated as they wouldn’t be. Or the Generals could use her name to stop all talk of helping the Districts; look at what happened. We must be patient, wait for after the tolling of the bell at midnight. If the world ends tonight, we must go quietly. 

The youngest rebel, due to be executed, seventeen and half-convinced he would be spared the noose and be reaped next month instead and not knowing whether to hope for that or not, not knowing what would be worse, closed his eyes and repeated her words to himself, a litany, a comforting lullaby. He would be killed tonight at midnight; he would still be fighting at 11.59. He saw the quote, the cold, bare truth, in white, burning, etched against the back of his eyelids as he stayed up at night waiting for the lick of the flames. Until the very last minute, he hoped.

I am a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.

The rebels were wrong, in the end. They believed their children had nothing to fear from the Capitol, but they were wrong. Their children were sent to the training centre, not to be trained, but to be killed by the students during their training. They died serving the District, honourable deaths, their blood making up for their parents’ treachery.

 

  

_Is there still magic in the midnight sun,_

_Or did you leave it back in 61?_

 

Yes.

 

And no.

 

 

_I’d hear the field don’t grow_

_I’d hear the bell don’t ring_

 

**Year 74.**

 

Two children stood on the stage. Cato and Clove. The District’s hope. Two good solid prospects.

It all went wrong, immediately. The Capitol waxed on about the love story instead of their Tributes, despite Brutus’s best efforts. Two were harder and more practical, rough-hewn, the stone quarries in their blood instead of diamonds like One or, apparently, the pink-heart love in Twelve.

Love? The Capitol had never taught them its love of love. 

Cato’s long, lingering death brought simmering resentment. He didn’t deserve that. That bitch left him to die for hours. They didn’t teach those kind of slow deaths in Two, not like they did in Twelve. In Twelve kids wasted away, day after day. In Two it was clean cut and sharp, an arrow to the heart or the brain. Their kids went out fighting.

They shook their heads, hurried past each other in the street, went out to the pubs on weekdays and slammed tankards hard, got so drunk they had to bite their tongue to stop from saying, almost whining, and Two didn’t whine, _it wasn’t fair_.

That bitch. Damn Twelve. Barely civilised half savages, out in the wilderness. Should have been fire bombed out of existence just like Thirteen. Not fit to be protected by the Capitol. What did they ever do to contribute, what did they ever do, apart from their torture of Cato? 

When the rebellion comes, it surprises Two. They hated the fairy-tale love story of the two victors from Twelve – and if anyone should have had two victors come home it was them – and hated the girl especially for what she had done to their Tributes. The Capitol carefully tweaked its broadcasts in Two, playing less of the betrothed couple and more of the generic Games programming. Peeta and Katniss were shuttled through for an official dinner, with forced smiles and tightened eyes. They just looked relieved to be nearing the end of the tour.

Another year, a loss. But they could win next year. There was always next year. In the centre, the girls and boys trained harder, practiced kissing and spat out the taste of it afterwards. 

In the other Districts, resentment built and calcified, layers upon layers hardening in their hearts. When you’re living for the future but the future won’t come and you decide the time has come to take it.

In the Third Quarter Quell, the District regains its sense of balance. They can win this. They have the largest pool of victors, and many of them still hale and hearty, young and strong. They won’t be forced to scrounge up old Victors, pregnant Victors, drug addicts and prostitutes like the other Districts. For their Victors, it’s like they left the Games only yesterday. Their Victors will again be volunteers and they will serve their country proudly again.

Two is determined to win this time, to show their loyalty in these dark and uncertain times. They will show the Capitol and the other Districts, the rebellious ones, that Two will never fall. The rebels might as well not even try, not even struggle. Children don’t have to die. It’s a choice to make. Especially during this Hunger Games, where children will not be reaped, almost a mercy from the Capitol.

Almost.

 

 

_Don’t you know the kingdom’s under siege_

_And everybody needs you_

 

**Year 75.**

 

The people are cowed after District after District had fallen, but not passive. Not defeated. The rebels will have to kill them all to do that. If somebody told them Two would fall at midnight, they would fight until 11.59. Booby traps line the deserted streets. People rig their own homes with explosives. Rock their children to sleep underneath the mess of wires. They won’t let the savages rape their women and steal their children. Won’t make it easy. Won’t let them take their home and their district without bodies. The bodies of their children, or their elderly parents, or the rebels, or them; whoever, it didn’t matter. There would be a price for taking Two. The other Districts could lose their heads, lose their fear, lose themselves, but Two would stand with the Capitol that fed it, protected it, created it.

Weren’t there Capitol soldiers fighting just as desperately in Two? Weren’t there men and women who had left their safe homes and come to fight for their favourite District, the District that confirmed everything they told themselves, everything they were taught; they were merciful, they were protectors, they were needed. They took savages and civilised them; they taught the uneducated, saved the needy, cured the criminals. Without Two, there could be no Capitol. So they fought together. It was all Two had ever wanted.

Lyme laughed. It was all she had ever wanted, the Districts to unite, and when they did they united to destroy her home. 

The rebels have taken heavy casualties; uninterested in taking anymore. They have to fight through Two to get to the nut, but it’s not a liberation. Not like in Six, when old women ran to them with warm bread held aloft in their arms, stretching out, to give to their liberators. Or in Four when banners flew high, sky blue against the grey sky, aloft in the wind, like a waving flag, a land set free. In Two, the only people on the streets are enemies, and they are shot; snipers hide in the shadows, not shy little childen, cute and awed by the heavy boots of the rebels.

They’re grim as they slog through Two. They remember their brothers and sisters in Six, massacred as they turned to run, bullets shot through their backs, and the protestors in Nine who were promised safe passage but were slaughtered to the man and woman. The battalions Two sent to march through the Districts, like it was their right, like it was their duty, like they had no obligation to help free the persecuted and the downtrodden. Those battalions had fallen or were still fighting, stuck, out in the Districts. There was still the defence regiment in Two, hardened soldiers, and a motley collection of teenagers and the elderly. Some soldiers had nothing to lose, no home or family to go back to any longer. They mourn Twelve, gone just like Thirteen. Someone will pay for that. And it’s not Snow who is in front of them.

The rebels must be harsh, because that was all Two understood. They had suckled at the breast of the Capitol for all those decades, believing their lies. Forgoing their own brothers and sisters, their own people. Letting them bleed and starve and die. Just for the Capitol’s trinkets. Even the youngest child in Eleven hated Two. Even Four and One hated them. Lyme hated Two too, mostly, but she would have disapproved of the strategy. It didn’t matter, because victory was so close, and they would do what they had to to take Two and worry about the rest after. 

Two will never understand; the Capitol will burn through all the Districts in its frenzy to save itself, and just because it’ll come to Two last doesn’t mean it will spare them. Thirteen was breakfast; Twelve, lunch; and Two will be dinner but they’re too crazed by decades of propaganda and too full of decades of bread to see it. There was never any cry of a hungry child in Two, and it made them lose their humanity. The Capitol didn’t steal it; it was given freely. 

Two can’t be saved. The rebels don’t even try.

Men above twelve – reaping age, some rebels laugh – and below sixty are separated from the mass of streaming refugees. Taken to the fields; interrogated. Shot with minimal fuss, more often than not. A teenager with a gaping leg wound is pulled from his screaming sister. She beats her fists against the unyielding rebel. He pulls her by the hair, demands to know how he received his injury. “A mortar bomb when we were hiding, please, _please_ ,” she sobs to no avail. The men question him on the street in front of her, and he pleads and tells them he didn’t fight, but it’s a lie, the rebels know. Everyone fought. The only question is what side they were on. And in two, it’s not even a question. They shoot him, leave him with his sister and their mother crying over his body.

It’s sentimental, leaving the women. They probably fought too. Just as hard as the men and just as brutally and just as unforgivable. But there are orders from command, Commander Lyme, and she’s Two but they all respect her, and orders aren’t always obeyed – Mason cut through the pardoned Capitol generals in Six like they were tall reeds - but those ones were very clear. Leave the women of Two. Still, the Capitol had done the same after the Dark Days, more or less, so quid pro fucking quo as the fancy over-educated Capitolites would say, and they can’t kill everyone, anyway. It’s practical.

The children of Two are silent and dry eyed as they watch the conquering army sweep through the outlying District. Some of the rebels are impressed despite themselves. The youngest soldier of Two had been seven. Wielded a sword almost as big as himself, had started Training in the autumn, and wasn’t Two so cruel to its children. Damn, they knew Two were hard, but that was something else, they’d have to remember it, tell their family when they got back home to the stables of Ten or the canal boats of Six.

Some stared at the always watchful children, a bit uneasy, and wondered if they should go over and give them sweets, like had they done with the children in all previous Districts.

But they weren’t innocent, were they? Even the children of the Capitol were more innocent; they never had a choice. The rebels understood: if they had grown up in the Capitol with its opulence and glamour, if they had never truly understood the Games, then they would probably be trying to protect the lives they led and the society they had grown up in, the people they loved. But Two faced the reaping, Two faced turning its children into killers or letting them die staring into death afraid, and watching it anyway. Two were the underclass who fought for their own oppression, Two could bring the whole Games down and refused to, Two laughed at the other District’s stick thin Tributes, Two sent children who weren’t really children every year to slaughter them.

If the rebels had grown up in Two, imagine what they could have done! Maybe the war would have been shorter; certainly, many more could have been saved. Twelve might have been saved.

But to grow up in the Districts and to support the Capitol, year after year, Game after Game, bloodbath after bloodbath. How could the soldiers understand that.

Perhaps they were doing it for their children, hardened their hearts and their faces so their children would never know fear. But there was no sympathy for Two there: the rebels had left their children. The rebels had seen their children die. The rebels had brought the wrath and fire of the Capitol on their children’s heads, and they’d done it for their children.

Killing children wasn’t right, but it was necessary.

Two falls. It falls like the kingdom of the old days, the city gates flung open, the walls breached, the victorious army streaming in, the river of blood in the streets, an orgy of killing and revenge.

The rebels send the strong, surviving children of Two to the Capitol. Most had grown up dreaming of one day walking its streets. Let them see the streets stinking with fear and the ash rising from the pavement, let them gaze at the grand skyscrapers they had imagined like castles in the sky rising like jagged steps, let them see the destruction wrought because the Capitol wrongly thought Two would always be enough to protect them.

It was a tough nut to crack. It had taken three-quarters of a century, it had taken children’s corpses, too many to count, it had taken violence and sacrifice so great the rebels sank to their knees and hoped God was counting because they had long stopped doing so. But they had done it. They had forced open the stronghold, the palace in the sky, the fortress. The one prison that had locked its gates from the inside and turned their back on the mass of skeletons at the entrance, had torn out their own hearts and tossed them through the iron bars, never enough. The one place the first rebels could never take, and if they had it all would have been so different. All the loss and pain of the intervening 75 years had been due to District Two. What could come next was almost unimaginable.

 

 

_Castles in the sky sit stranded_

_Vandalised_

 

**Year 0.**

 

75 years, and their final tally was a single Victor. There was nothing left to cling to; no pride, no glory. No Victors. Their strongest, gone so easily. It wasn’t supposed to end like that. They had survived the Arena, survived the madness that lingered and threatened to consume them whole, survived the one thing most didn’t. At least they went fighting. Perhaps it was better that way.

After all, how could they have lived in a world without the Hunger Games? Lived in a world where they were told, and everyone knew, they had killed children for the Capitol? How they had supported the Capitol, how they didn’t have to plunge a sword into a boy’s chest or swing an axe into a girl’s throat for their deaths to be their fault?

Yes. It was for the best.

They hadn’t imagined it ending like that ever. The Capitol had told them – no, they had told themselves, the rebels corrected sternly, forcing them to watch Twelve’s firebombing, again and again, the close up of the bomb and stamped in black block writing, incriminating where once it would have made them proud, DISTRICT TWO, before they were unleashed on the small shacks, the pretty little houses in the merchant’s quartier, the flyaway blonde hair of the children that could have been Two – it would last for thousands of years. For ever. And now they had to build something else. They still had the mountains. They could dig deep, deep within, and endure. And they did. 

The peace talks took place in Two’s outskirts, the unconditional surrender signed in the former home of the mayor. The borders of Panem would be opened but remain. Two was divided; the outskirts, the villages that had turned easily and first, given to the rebels and the core, with the nut, attached to the Capitol where a parliament sat with representatives from the Old Capitol – fast becoming a redundant phase – and the rebels. They endured.

The proposal to institute a new Hunger Games, involving both the Capitol and Two was announced. They would be forced to turn on their own, on the Capitol they had loved and protected for so long, at such cost. They endured.

The girl they hated so much saved them from this prospect, her long plait swinging as she took aim and fired, and no-one in Two could have had a better shot. She refused to set foot in Two as long as she lived and they were relieved.

At first, in the years immediately after the war was lost, the people of Two walk with their heads down, bowed, eyes to the floor. They talk in low voices, mumbling, when the rich tourists from the Capitol come to see their ruined former patronised District that in the end couldn’t save them, as careless and insensitive as ever, and the poor tourists are bussed in from the Districts to see their victory in the flesh, see what their flesh paid for.

But the post-war Two state was built on the Capitolite one. The military commanders, too valuable, were saved and pardoned and parachuted to the Capitol by the victorious rebels, needed for their experience and to confer legitimacy. Needed to contain the rebellion that was already brewing in Seven, the rebels squabbling with their former comrades over land and resources and competing ideas. After the war the Capitol is still the richest autonomous area, still where the ruling live and rule from, and everyone knows it and the poor of the Districts are still exploited. It’s just not law. The biggest difference is, perhaps, that the poor of the Capitol lose their protections and are now exploited more. That’s it. What the bodies of their children were for. Even the Mockingjay lost her sister. And for that. In Two, people can’t help but shake their head.

There was too much money, too much infrastructure in Two to let it fall completely, like some of the more vengeful wanted, true retribution; most of the buildings in the centre that had manufactured the bombs that flattened the other districts had been spared the blanket bombing of the outer districts. The Nut was rebuilt as a priority. Two’s muscles flexed for months; they coughed for years. Special classes were introduced in schools and new textbooks produced and Two’s children were taught of their parent’s mistakes. Every year, all of the children went to the Capitol – the borders were open now and there they mingled with children from other Districts, including ones whose family member had been killed by Two’s bombs, and ones who knew nothing of Two – and every year all of the children went to Twelve to see what their bombs and their District had wrought. Sometimes they met the Mockingjay and she was kind to her enemy’s children. She took pictures and let the older ones hold her children, and play with them, and she always obliged a little girl who wanted her to plait her golden hair in the famous photo they had seen of her, and she tucked their smartly pressed blouses into their skirts as the teacher choked back tears, and Katniss smiled at her coldly.

Life went on, and it seemed war was an eternal part of life. Civil war in Seven, Peacekeeper brutality on the streets of the Capitol, directed at the poor District migrants that had flooded in. They all supposed it was a fair price to pay. Snow was gone. And Coin. It was these two that were the problem; not the institutions they left behind, intact.

Two seized their opportunity decades later, a political crisis in the Capitol, upstarts from the District challenging the old Capitol elite, and the Capitol needed them, needed their firepower, just like the old days, but this time they came crawling on their knees, begging. And of course the District obliged – but at a price. If they won this fight, Two would be reunited, against the wishes of the other autonomous areas, scared of their potential power. And they did win, and an aging Enobaria announced reunification on live TV, the idea to get the Mockingjay to do it to placate the rebels and reluctantly agreed to by Two having fallen through when she refused, and most days it felt they had won the war instead of losing it. 

There were always dissidents. As the mountains endured. And as the mountain endured, so did the Capitol.

 

_I saw the ending, and I closed the page._

_I’d hear the good girls die,_

_and the sky don’t snow_

_I’d hear the bird don’t sing._


End file.
